RECIPE: Mac and Cheese 2

1 pound elbow pasta
8 tablespoons unsalted butter plus more for dish
3 cups panko flakes
2 pounds extra sharp cheddar, grated
8 ounces Monterrey Jack, grated
5 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups whole milk
1 cups heavy cream
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Note: the only salt I used was in seasoning the water for cooking pasta, so don't forget to salt the water before you add the noodles.

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, butter a large baking dish and grate the cheese while pasta is cooking. (For the love of God, buy a food processor. The 11-cup Cuisinart is the perfect size for grating two and a half pounds of cheese)
2. In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 3 tablespoons of butter and integrate panko and two cups of cheese. Remove from pan and set aside.
3. Return pan to heat and melt remaining butter.
4. Add flour, red pepper flakes and pepper and stir constantly over medium heat for three minutes.
5. Whisk in milk, bring sauce to a boil, whisking constantly and simmer for 3-5 minutes to thicken.
6. Add cream, cheese and mustard and turn off the burner. Stir until sauce is a uniform consistency.
7. Incorporate cooked pasta and pour into the buttered baking dish.
8. Spread panko mixture across the top and bake 20 minutes or until golden brown on top and bubbly throughout.

JOURNAL: Mac-sterpiece

There was wisdom on those post-its stuck in the book next to the elBulli 7 Bowl System (my birthday is this week, wink wink). I made a batch last night, and it was ggggooooooooooddddddd. That's "good" not "god" by the way.

I only had a pound and a half of Cabot extra-sharp Hunter Cheddar, so I had to supplement with a half-pound of Tillamook Extra Sharp and a half-pound of Tillamook Monterrey Jack. The notes called for 5 tablespoons of butter in the roux, so I went with five of flour, like I planned and I bumped the dijon up to a tablespoon. I really should have gone with more red pepper flakes and remembered black pepper, because it was surely under-seasoned, but it is so tasty.

My only concerns are that the sauce might just be too dense, and that some of the topping clumped, so the bigger chunks browned and hardened faster. Simple solutions: 1/2 cup of reserved pasta cooking water in the sauce next time and taking an extra 30 seconds to chop up the topping before I put it over the mac.

My mother makes a mac and cheese from four ingredients with a recipe that takes all of five minutes to prep, and I can't say that mine is any better, but if nothing else, it's thicker. This one is my best yet, if you want to give it a shot. I'll post the recipe soon.

JOURNAL: Feast of Fools

In an online discussion, someone asked, should I be forced to choose, what single food could I not live without. Unable to narrow it down to a single dish, my first response was Chicken Tikka Masala over Mac & Cheese, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that my humor/horror show of an answer might have actual potential.

I'm hoping to make both this weekend, so we'll see how well they combine and in what way. I am hypothesizing that Chicken Tikka, without the sauce, would be an easy addition to the Mac and even a little Masala integrated into the cheesy sauce with chunks of chicken might just work. I'll let you know how it goes.

ARTIFACT: Lost Mac And Cheese Recipe

Of all things, I was flipping through a book on ecologically sound design practices, and between the pages, stuck to a drool-stained magazine page featuring the 7 bowl system from elBulli designed for Ferran Adria, was a pair of post-its labeled Matt's Mac. I can't be sure how many refinements and tests went into this recipe, and it isn't complete, but I think it is the ingredients and measurements that I used to love, so I am going to compare and integrate it with recent attempts next week.

REFLECTION: My Most Recent Batch of Mac And Cheese

Concerns: low mac:cheese ratio, thinness/soupiness of the cheese sauce after stove-top cooking, sharpness/bitterness of cheese flavors, lack of density and stringiness in final product.

Successes: elimination of the roux/flour flavor, overwhelmingly cheesy flavor, excellent topping, leftover potential, overwhelmingly positive feedback from TSB and my roommate.

Mistakes: I was so irritated by the sauce to pasta ratio as I was incorporating the noodles that I scooped two or three full cups of sauce out of the mix and threw it in the fridge (which reminds me that I still need to dispose of it). In retrospect, I should have left it in, as it seems that it would have been a non-issue once baked.

Strategy: Next time, I will maintain the amount of cream but reduce the milk to a pint, maybe fatten it up from 2% to whole milk, raise the roux by a tablespoon each of flour and butter (leaving 1 tablespoon from the stick left to butter the dish), and spend more time getting the initial béchamel to thicken before adding the cheese. I'm going to return to Cabot extra-sharp cheddar and monterey jack as well, even if I do have to have my cheese smuggled in from Vermont. I might play with the cheese blend some other time, and in the future, I may attempt the inclusion of reserved pasta cooking water, once I figure out why it is so prevalent in other recipes.

RECIPE: Mac And Cheese 1

1 pound elbow pasta, cooked
6 tablespoons unsalted butter plus more for dish
2 cups panko flakes
2 pounds sharp cheddar, grated (about 7 cups)
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons salt
3 cups 2% milk
2 cups heavy cream
8 ounces gruyere, grated (about 2 cups)
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, butter a large baking dish and grate cheese while pasta is cooking.
2. In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and integrate panko and one cup of cheddar. Remove from pan and set aside.
3. Return pan to heat and melt remaining butter.
4. Add flour and stir constantly over medium heat for three minutes. Season with red pepper flakes, salt and pepper.
5. Whisk in milk, bring sauce to a boil, whisking constantly, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 5 minutes to thicken.
6. Stir in cream, cheese and mustard until sauce is a uniform consistency. Remove from heat.
7. Stir cooked pasta into the sauce and pour into the buttered baking dish.
8. Spread breadcrumb mixture across the top and bake 25 minutes or until golden brown on top and bubbly throughout.

JOURNAL: Marvelous Mac And Cheese Chaos

I've been working on my mac & cheese recipe for a while. Last week's manifestation, as prepared for the pleasure of The Sexy Blonde was one of my finest, although in a misguided attempt to appeal to her sophisticated tastes, I decided to reinforce the sharp cheddar with gruyere, which she seemed to like, but I thought was too much sharp on top of sharp and the gruyere was hard to incorporate into the sauce. There were a few other issues with the sauce that I need to hammer out, but it came out well and the leftovers seem to have improved with age.

My fascination started with my dear mother's gorgeous baked macaroni and cheese, a straightforward and divine dish made with sharp Cabot cheddar that we anticipated each holiday season and fought ruthlessly over the crispy corner sections. I love this family recipe for its simplicity and high cheese and butter content as a side to accompany a robust holiday meal, but when I want mac to be the centerpiece, I tend to go for something stickier and more complex.

Unfortunately, I have overindulged my desire for complexity and the mac and cheese fascination has taken on a life of it's own. It's like the Michael Mina Mac, or "macaroni and cheese served three ways." This isn't just three variations, but an evolutionary development in three courses that I should never serve all together.

I'm trying to devise a single recipe that will function first as a stove-top mac right out of the pot, equivalent to Kraft, but actually made with cheese; thinner and more fluid, hot on the side of your plate. From there, with minimal alteration to the compound, I'd like to be able to pour it into a baking dish, add a crispy cheese and breadcrumb topping and bake it to a more dense and sticky consistency. Third, I would be able to leave the baked mac in the fridge overnight to solidify, slice it up, bread it and deep fry it like a mozzarella stick.

I would also like to see the flavors evolve as the dish becomes more complicated. It starts out seasoned simply with salt and pepper, red pepper, nutmeg and mustard, served like you would the boxed variety. I am thinking of making the baked dish more savory with bacon or prosciutto and scallions or shallots, and spicy peppers would be added to a portion of the leftovers and then chilled, cut into chicken nugget (or fish stick) size pieces to be breaded and deep fried. I could even spoon dollops of warm mac and cheese into emptied jalapeños, and fry them up as poppers. Fried mac could be served with dipping sauces like marinara, ranch or an avacado & sour cream concoction. All that I have left to discover is a 4th incarnation. Could I come up with a macaroni and cheese dessert? Maybe something with pears. It seems kind of evil, but it could work.

I've been playing with my recipe for a while, inspecting a combination of recipes including those online from Charlie Palmer, Giada De Laurentiis, Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Bon Appétit, Emeril, The Icon Grill, Paula Deen, and Cooks Illustrated, but my favorite recipe comes from the New York Times, but is not the one that shows up online so often, which ran with this article. In fact, I have not been able to find it online at all, but this one from Gourmet is pretty close, and I have photocopied the page from my Sunday Times Magazine several times when friends ask me for a reliable, remarkable recipe, but it still has yet to meet my three-in-one requirement...and you thought I was taking it too seriously before the Holy Trinity allusion.

MENU: Last Night

My gratitude for The Sexy Blonde and her tasting tour assistance in wine country last week prompted me to prepare a hearty meal of comfort food for two last night, and I was so appreciative that I found the time to make everything from scratch.

Crostini with olive tapenade and goat cheese
Salad of butter lettuce, golden beets, walnuts and goat cheese with a shallot vinaigrette
Baked macaroni and cheese (sharp cheddar and gruyere with crispy topping)
Chicken schnitzel (with carbombbq sauce on the side)
Swedish ginger cookie cups with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce
A bottle of Carignane that we picked up around Healdsburg

She seemed happy, but complained that I was going to make her fat, but she is the last person to need to worry about that. We joked about what a great story it would make for a chef to seduce his women with his cooking, fatten them up and then cast them aside and move on to the next conquest, but then what will the chef get as his just des(s)erts?